Bryan, your hyper-ventilating posting style makes you miss some larger points.
BryanM wrote:Man, remember when this guy was senator for life in Louisiana? It would have been great to have chosen to take back Louisiana, socialist Kansas, and Utah. Oh well. Too bad. Guess we'll just nuke Canada instead. That'll fix things.
Just like Chicago, ha. "Who cares if opposition is stifled through intimidation, and officials are bought and paid for, and cronyism runs rampant, and the state's finances are depleted, as long as our boy 'whips' our enemies and says all the right words?" There's a reason that [socialist] Sinclair Lewis saw him as a tyrant in the making. No Hillaries needed if even prominent leftists could see through him.
Government employees were forced to give a portion of their salary to Long for "discretionary" purposes. What a champion of the poor... Poor, deluded leftists, more accurately. If the only way you can cheer on your political beliefs is through the actions of a dictator... well, that doesn't say much about the efficacy of those beliefs. At least in a democracy.
I myself have walked inside Long's
literally towering symbol of his own self-importance. I don't want to unnecessarily disparage a man wrongly killed before his time, but his dying words "I can't die yet; I have so much more to do." have the ring of egotism in them, given his endless ambition.
Nobody ever says making a profit is illegal, though it is the very definition of theft when we're talking about life and death necessities.
One of the first tenets of "Share our Wealth" is that it would have been illegal to make money over a certain amount. I'm not some hardcore "supply-sider," but you'd have to be ignorant if you think that people in upper-income brackets (like you know, doctors or lawyers or even orchestra performers) don't actually spend their larger share of money, and that
this is actually a good thing. To say nothing of inheritance, which was another thing "Share our Wealth" ignorantly peddled to poor people ("Just think of all those rich folks GIVING THEIR MONEY TO THEIR CHILDREN! Doesn't that make you mad!?! Ignore the part of that platform plank that will make you suffer, though, and keep on being mad!") Adding to this is the realization that to take as much money as Long wanted to pay each and every citizen would be impossible
if he had artificially capped the incomes of those same people. Why would a business bust its ass to make $10 million if all it could keep was $1 million? How would you force it to keep up the pace,
without it becoming forced labor? These are questions Long and his ilk never considered (nor needed to to get people whipped up and angry).
Ignorance of history is paramount to a lot of ""socialist"" idol-worship because you need to forget how shitty they were in order to idolize them. There is a lot of reasonable, scholarly doubt as to the efficacy of many of the New Deal initiatives, which I flip back and forth on, but far better that than the stupidity of a southern autocratic
boss hoss promising everyone free money as long as he gets the keys to their car.
There's always this pathological belief among people that almost forces them to think that in order to help the poor, or the marginalized,
it can only be done at the expense of screwing over someone higher up on the totem pole. Which ignores how many people actually can and do move up or down it (e.g. the majority of people who inherit large amounts of wealth end up far poorer than their parents). Conversely, picking someone lower on the totem pole yields more or less the same results: cherry-picking winners and increasing the store of victim politics.
If someone is allowed to walk around free in society, buy breakfast cereals at Wal-Mart, breathe the same air as me, have interactive access to my kids, then of course they should be able to fucking vote. This is so simple, it should be put into the constitution.
I'm glad we're in agreement. Note how I separated the two questions in my initial post. I prefer laws and procedures
actually be followed. It's better to have a process that if slow-moving, is more equitable and transparent than a person
deciding by him or herself that "It's obviously the right thing to do."
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inb4 the smarmy "what about Trump" riposte from someone else. Fuck it; I'm not voting for that asshole for many of the same reasons listed above.
@antron: there is truly no point in talking to you (or you talking) if you cannot grasp arguments (reading them or making them). If the best you can offer are vague nitpicks about word choice, then the conversation isn't going anywhere. Step up your game, because for at least 2-3 posts, no one could have a feasible clue of what you are trying to say, what point you are trying to make, or why, other than "it makes me feel bad! =( "
That's how it should be, anyways.
